Abstract: Propelled by fast-growing applications in datacenter interconnects, LIDAR, and optical computing, silicon photonics has transformed from academic research to standard offering by commercial foundries. While such platforms typically offer propagation loss at the dB/cm level, recent advances in processing capabilities enabled a novel class of fully-CMOS-compatible silicon-nitride waveguides to be produced in a commercial foundry with loss well below 1 dB/m, representing over 100-fold improvement.

Such a dramatic improvement in waveguide loss, combined with the repeatability and scalability of CMOS-foundry fabrication, can enable a wide range of applications in precision metrology, sensing, navigation, imaging, and computation. This talk will discuss the basic platform and building-block devices, such as the waveguide itself, directional couplers, and resonators. It will then proceed to give an overview of how such devices can be practically engineered to create ultra-low noise integrated lasers, highly-coherent optical frequency combs, Stimulated Raman and Brillouin lasers, and tens-of-meter-long optical delay lines.

Biography: Warren Jin is Photonics Engineer at Anello Photonics, working to develop next-generation integrated-photonics-based optical gyroscopes for autonomous navigation and sensing. He obtained his doctoral degree from the University of California, Santa Barabara in 2021.

­­This seminar is sponsored by the Department of Applied Physics and the Ginzton Laboratory